Strava

The Strava Files

Everyone agrees that when Kim Flint crashed, he was chasing a record on Strava, the social fitness site that has rewritten the etiquette of cycling and shattered its traditions, transformed countless lives for the better, and fostered as many friendships (and rivalries). What almost no one seems to fully comprehend is exactly who—or what—caused Flint’s death.

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Flint crashed descending through this corner of South Park Drive, which has pitches as steep as 20 percent.

(Photo by Winni Wintermeyer)

No matter what else you might say about Kim Flint, you can’t claim that he was stupid. Flint was an electrical engineer at Nvidia, a $4 billion, 6,000-employee­ Silicon Valley firm (Forbes magazine’s 2007 Company of the Year) known for making graphics-processing units, used in such products as Sony PlayStation. He managed a group responsible for signal integrity, which eliminates digital “noise” to ensure the quality of information transmitted and received by electronic devices. “Signal integrity is a niche field,” explains Flint’s former boss, Ting Ku. “It’s fairly small, exclusive, and rare. You’re working with digital signals in the gigahertz range—ones and zeros going really fast. Not many people understand it.” As a college undergraduate, Flint had been a Regents Scholar, the most prestigious aid award at the University of California; according to his parents, he had studied biology at UC Berkeley as a seventh grader and gotten the highest grade in the class. On his website, the Kimatorium, he ­posted papers he had written about his work—for example, “Effect of Bypass Capacitor Placement and Layer Switching.”

But Flint was not, says Ku, a typical engineer. “At the lunch table, he was one who did a lot of talking because he had interesting things to say about any topic. He was fun in that regard—he had experiences that not many people have.” In the 1990s, Flint worked for Gibson Guitar’s R&D lab for electronic instruments. During a ­sabbatical in 2003, he played jazz guitar while he taught himself signal integrity and tried to build a ­theremin—an instrument that can ­produce music without being touched by the musician, and a longtime staple of the sound tracks of ­science-fiction and suspense movies. In the music world, Flint was widely known as the creator of Looper’s Delight, a clearinghouse for information on the eccentric ­subculture of ­looping: repeating electronic samples that enable a solo player to create a textured, ­multilayered sound. Several of that discipline’s premier practitioners—Paul Drescher, Zoe Keating, Amy X. Newberg—were Flint’s friends.

With his girlfriend of 19 years, Violet Hefner—keeper of pet rats and rabbits, and the pink-haired curator of undented.com, a website devoted to Tori Amos—Flint lived in a rented warehouse on Adeline Street in West Oakland, a low-income, high-crime part of town near the eastern end of the Bay Bridge. One of their rooms was filled with Flint’s guitars and electronic devices; another housed a VW bug that never left the premises. Although he made good money, Flint commuted to work in an old Honda Civic, which he parked on the street at night with the windows open to prevent break-ins. “I drive up and down Interstate 880 a lot,” Flint disclosed on his website. “If you are ever in the fast lane and you see me behind you, please move out of the way. I’m tired of having to pass all you slow people on the right.”

Chris Aynesworth, an Oakland-based web designer, got to know Flint at a bar called Heinold’s First and Last Chance, a log-cabin-like saloon in Jack London Square, where a coterie of contrarians—a dog walker, a ceramic artist, a housepainter, a former Oakland port commissioner—convened on Friday nights “to get away from our lives and jobs.” Aynesworth found Flint “quietly brilliant, superconcentrated, cerebral. He had a quiet self-­confidence—he didn’t need to prove anything, he did things because he wanted to.” Neal Trembath, who shared a house with Flint in college and later worked with him at Gibson, says, “Kim was funny, sardonic, and sincere all at the same time. He was a clear, purposeful thinker who wanted­ others to think about things, not provide them with answers. He wanted people to question their own beliefs. He tried to make people’s lives better by challenging them in some way. He loaned ­money to homeless people on the street, but they had to pay him back. He even taught one of them, a guy named Will, computer skills for free so he could find a job.”

Still, Flint could be contentious—a fact that occasionally created friction at work. “His style was confrontational,” says Ku, who promoted Flint to manager after a few years at Nvidia. “He was an in-your-face type of person, and when something was not exactly right, he was very direct in pointing it out—not in private.” On his website, Flint gave vent to the edgier aspects of his personality. The message that greeted online visitors read, in part, “Your moral values are meaningless, artificial constructs.” The URL was annihilist.com, a nod to Flint’s nickname for himself, “Bitter Annihilist,” and, perhaps, also a description of his personal style: an almost-shaved skull backed by a bushy ponytail, punctuated by a 6-inch-long soul patch (or, as he called it, “goat beard”) dangling from his chin. He was also a vegetarian who, besides electrical engineering and computer science, had majored in peace and conflict studies in college.

WHEN FLINT STARTED riding in his late 30s, many of his friends were surprised. A small-framed guy of about 5-foot-9, he’d studied karate and played soccer and water polo in high school, but as an adult was never especially athletic. “Kim was always healthy,” says Trembath. “He did sit-ups every morning. But at midlife he decided he wanted to become superfit. He started drinking egg milk shakes and working out three hours a day. It was like Rocky.”

As part of his gym routine, Flint rode a stationary bike, bragging to friends that he pedaled with the resistance on its highest setting. Soon he got a Specialized road bike and embarked on a path familiar to anyone caught up in the conversion to two-wheeled religion: He got a handlebar computer, shaved his legs, and, four months before his 40th birthday, did a 104-mile ride. At first he retained his “annihilist” style—all black kit—but as he lost weight and gained muscle, he got rid of his trademark ponytail and let the hair grow in on top of his head. The soul patch remained, but he trimmed it down. Flint sought out the hardest climbs he could find into the Berkeley-Oakland hills: Centennial Drive, Claremont Avenue, Thornhill Drive, Hiller Highlands, Moeser Lane, Ascot Drive, El Toyonal, many of which contained grades of 10 to 15 percent. (“What’s wrong with you people, going up Butters?” he tweeted about a shady, 4 percent alternative to wide-open 8 percent Joaquin Miller Road. “Easy shit. Losers.”) Venturing farther from home, he tackled several of the Bay Area’s signature routes: Mount Hamilton in Santa Clara County, Mount Tamalpais in Marin, King Ridge in Sonoma. He entered the Mount Diablo Challenge, an 11-mile climb of a 3,800-foot peak in Contra Costa County, finishing 328th out of 1,000 (70th out of 151 in the 30 to 39 age group). Not surprisingly, he kept track of all his ride data and posted it online—a tendency that “really escalated when he got involved with Strava,” his partner, Violet, has said. “It became an obsession.”

Strava.com, the most successful, popular, and influential social fitness network to arise over the past half-dozen years, had launched soon after Flint started riding in 2009. Within a year, the cyclist would infamously come to epitomize its allure, value, and menace.